I think Avi nailed it pretty well in his "Turtles All The Way Down" post. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3284695382
Its not just the language, it's the environment.
I love the seaside method of finding/fixing problems. Program halts, ugly web page shows, click debug, switch windows, find problem, fix, click proceed, switch to Monticello window, save out new version to web based repository. At no time did the app go down or did I wait for some reinitialization. I also love that I can wander around with my project (2 files .image and .changes) and 3 VMs on a keychain and work on it wherever.
Now if we just had a better database story...
-----Original Message-----
From: seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Jason Rogers
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 8:04 AM
To: Seaside List
Subject: [Seaside] Rails and Seaside
In hist post at
http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/weblog/2006/01/finding-signal-to-noise-ratio-in-never.html,
Reg Braithwaite has this to say about why Rails is chosen over Seaside. I am curious to hear others thoughts...
Personally, I would choose Seaside over Rails any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. How do the other users of Seaside feel? To me the decision about choosing Seaside over Rails is not *just* about the framework itself, it's also about the environment in which I am building my application. If Ruby came anywhere near Smalltalk's environment, I might be more willing to lean toward Ruby.
[quote]
Speaking of Rails, I'm going to conclude with my take on one reason why Rails is taking off and Seaside is not. Rails allows programmers to express the idioms they already know (relational databases, web-backed MVC, stateless event handling plus a global session store) in fewer bits.
Seaside provides a whole new idiom, continuations, that IMO is more powerful. I think you end up with an even higher signal-to-noise ratio with a Seaside app than with a Rails app. Why? Because continuations afford you a much higher degree of controller reuse.
Now, here's the catch: if you try to imagine your current application running on both Rails and on Seaside, you probably won't see much difference between the two (although they'll both be an order of magnitude better than ASP.NET). They will look the same because you designed your application with idioms that both Rails and Seaside support.
To get a big win, you'd have to rethink your application's flow and logic. You'd have to "think in Seaside." And you're not going to do that. So you pick Rails, like so many others have picked it, because it looks just like your ASP app, only all the noise has gone away.
It's all signal, baby.
[/quote]
--
Jason Rogers
"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."
Galatians 2:20
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